Restless Wanderings Plagued Williams` Last Days Last Of A Five-part Series

July 11, 1985|By Donald Spoto, Special to the Sun-Sentinel

The last six years of Tennessee Williams` life were a restless quadrille into which he drew various professional and personal partners. Scenes from old plays were revised, restructured, updated and shuffled with odd bits of new material written in hotel rooms or on the Concorde. Acts of new plays were rewritten late at night in Key West, or after dinner with a new producer. Major changes were incorporated at dizzy rehearsals. Always on the jump, eager to have his remarkable survival extend to his art, Williams at 65 was in one way as energetic as he had been at 25. That was the year of The Magic Tower and the constant flow of lyric poetry. He had the same zeal at 35, when he completed Summer and Smoke and drafted short stories andhim and astonished all who knew him. At this time, he began to call his studio ``the Madhouse.``

``He seemed to have no great personal needs except to write,`` Gene Persson said, referring to the time Williams spent in London in late 1976 and early 1977. ``He made a number of trips back and forth from Key West -- someone said he held the record number of trips on the Concorde.``

In mid-January 1977, he wrote to Persson in London that he was en route to New Orleans; he was at work on a new play that would be set there, and which joined parts of earlier plays and short stories and finally became Vieux Carre. He added that his traveling companion was a young, handsome Frenchman he had met in a New York restaurant, whose only asset was that he was trying to teach Williams French, and whom he intended to discard in New Orleans.

Once the young man was paid and dismissed, Williams settled for several weeks into the Dumaine Street apartment, where his resident manager saw to practical details. Since Robert Carroll was off on a Mexican holiday, Williams often ate alone at the Quarter Scene, at the corner of Dauphine and Dumaine, or took his laundry, alone, to the machines at Dumaine and Burgundy. Neighbors found him at Marti`s Restaurant and at the Cafe Lafitte in Exile, a famous bar that never locks its doors.

After shuttling a half-dozen times in 10 weeks between Key West and New Orleans, he was back in New York at the end of winter for rehearsals with director Arthur Alan Seidelman on Vieux Carre. Some of the problems with it were foreseen by actress Sylvia Sidney, but having worked with Seidelman when she played Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, she was eager and hopeful about a new play by Tennessee Williams.

``When I first read the play,`` she said, ``I was very enthusiastic but disappointed. I said I`d love to do it if it were a play, but as it was there were terrific problems. That was late in 1976. Several months later, Seidelman called me and said, `Now it`s a play, we`re ready to go.` ``

At the rehearsals, however, the cast and director were left very much on their own; promised rewrites were delivered by Williams`s friends, who made notes, reported decisions, conveyed requests to and from the playwright. ``None of us saw Tennessee for a long time,`` according to Sylvia Sidney, ``until we had major problems with several scenes. When he finally arrived, his excuse was, `I need to see it on its feet!` By then it was almost too late.`` But when she insisted on a rewrite for a certain phrase, or on a good exit line or a revision of some action, he could accommodate himself magnificently -- ``almost on demand,`` she recalled.

As opening night approached, Williams affected an unjustified if generous optimism, dancing late into the night at the opening of a new discotheque and laughing for society photographers -- but he was, as actor Richard Alfieri recalled, ``very nervous about what the critics would have to say.`` His nervousness was unfortunately manifest with his cast, just before the opening, as Alfieri and Sidney remembered; he stormed away after delivering an angry tirade about what a disservice he had done to himself by being too kind with them all. ``We knew he didn`t mean all of it, and we loved him when he came backstage after the first performance,`` according to Alfieri, but the damage had been done.

``He was so passionate about everything going well with regard to his work,`` as Bill Barnes said of that time, ``that he was in absolute despair when there was not a successful outcome. His life was full of trauma, turmoil and pain -- and this paradoxically made his life and work possible.``